As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. Information handling systems represent one option available to users. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information.
Because information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. Variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. Information handling systems may also include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
An Internet of Things (IoT) device is a type of information handling system particularly suitable for IoT environments and applications. The Internet of Things refers to dynamic configurations of objects with embedded technologies capable of communicating over public and private networks, and capable of bidirectional interactions with the environment individually or as organized systems. See, e.g., Dell, Inc., Massively Connected—The Evolving Internet of Things and Pervasive Computing Ecosystems, pp. 2-3, (Dell Software, 2014) (hereinafter “Massively Connected”), which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety. The emergence of the IoT is attributable to a convergence of evolving computational and communications technology with advances in software, data analytics and mobility. The IoT environment is spreading rapidly as people, organizations and existing systems assimilate its constituent technologies into their daily activities, applications, and business practices. Id. Not amenable to concise or formulaic definition, the IoT encompasses smart systems establishing networks of devices that communicate to collect data and interact with the surrounding environment. Id. Smarter devices, software, and networking technologies enable unprecedented opportunities for monitoring, controlling, and managing objects.
IoT devices may be referred to herein by various alternative names and designations including, without limitation, smart devices and smart sensors. Because IoT devices are frequently encountered at the architectural and conceptual edge of traditional networks, IoT devices may sometimes be referred to herein as network edge devices, platforms, actuators or embedded control points and systems.
An array of technological and social advances are contributing to the growth of the IoT. The launch of IPv6 in June of 2012 enabled billions of new devices to connect to the Internet, each with their own individual address designation. Mobile access and high-speed wireless connectivity have become ubiquitous, extending to ever-more remote locations. Smaller, cheaper, and better performing sensors and smart controllers can efficiently acquire data from the physical environment to help optimize operations and increase productivity. In addition, people are becoming increasingly comfortable using technology both at home and at work or school and the cost of deploying sophisticated personal technologies is falling steeply even as improvements to attributes such as battery life and functionality accelerate. Finally, high performance and cloud computing combined with powerful new tools for data analysis and software-defined infrastructure reap the benefits of and provide justification for the data collected by these billions of connected objects.
Nevertheless, the rapidly increasing availability, diversity, capability, and affordability of IoT devices in a wide range of applications and environments may make it difficult to determine the current and future availability of capabilities and resources offered within any local group of two or more IoT devices, potentially resulting in an unbalanced and unpredictable workload architecture.
Additionally, traditional load balancing approaches may fail to encompass resource inventory and availability changes that occur within smart sensor networks and other IoT device groups when resources are relocated or otherwise removed from a device group. Moreover, a lack of group resource coordination may result in underutilization when, as an example, a device is tasked to perform a particular low bandwidth measurement periodically with long intervals between measurements.